GLeeM
Elite Member
I would like to encourage people that are looking for a new project to run to check out Folding@Home.
Folding@Home is a mature project run by dedicated scientists at Stanford University. It will be around for a long time, they have plans in place for when the CPU count increases up to one million (currently 200,000).
F@H is through the phase of perfecting their software and is truly "NOW" sending WUs that are working to find cures to many diseases. You can see the diseases you could be helping to find cures for HERE.
They have many published papers about their research, a result of work that has been done by us crunchers. You can see that results of our contribution are freely shared by this non-profit organization.
Even though they have finished the long phase of perfecting their software they continue to find and test new technology to advance their research faster, a cure cannot be found fast enough for them.
These new technologies have led to some misunderstandings and problems.
For one thing, they use more resources than really should be used by a DC client. They solved this by making them voluntary, the client has to be configured to recieve them.
Another problem - how to entice folders to do them if they use more resources? Give bonus points for these WUs that do more science! This was recieved pretty well except that these are only a small percent of all WUs and there are not enough to go around. (We can randomly get them.)
With one new technology - QMD - that really speeded up the process, they had to make a decision. Because this new technology needed to use some licensed libraries they had to decide which compiler to use, for AMD or Intel processors. They looked at which processor type was the largest percent of all folding processors - Intel P4/Xeon. They also looked at which complier's libraries ran the WU the fastest - the Intel libraries.
Stanford recommends that these WUs only be run on dedicated machines. There are not many people that choose to run these WUs because they use so much memory bandwidth and ram (300MB for a short while at the beginning and then 200MB the rest of the time). In fact they are less than 1% of all WUs.
They say they benchmark them like all other bonus WUs, but they get more points per day. This has led to some hard feelings from Mac and AMD owners (AMDs do best on all other WUs).
Stanford has not been able to solve this problem yet - it is really an Intel/AMD not sharing their technology with each other problem.
The scientists desire to find cures takes precedent over hard feelings by some participants and so the testing of this new technology continues.
Thanks for considering Folding@Home for your next project.
This TeAm really should be ranked higher than 25 in this great project 🙂
EDIT: spelling 😕
Folding@Home is a mature project run by dedicated scientists at Stanford University. It will be around for a long time, they have plans in place for when the CPU count increases up to one million (currently 200,000).
F@H is through the phase of perfecting their software and is truly "NOW" sending WUs that are working to find cures to many diseases. You can see the diseases you could be helping to find cures for HERE.
They have many published papers about their research, a result of work that has been done by us crunchers. You can see that results of our contribution are freely shared by this non-profit organization.
Even though they have finished the long phase of perfecting their software they continue to find and test new technology to advance their research faster, a cure cannot be found fast enough for them.
These new technologies have led to some misunderstandings and problems.
For one thing, they use more resources than really should be used by a DC client. They solved this by making them voluntary, the client has to be configured to recieve them.
Another problem - how to entice folders to do them if they use more resources? Give bonus points for these WUs that do more science! This was recieved pretty well except that these are only a small percent of all WUs and there are not enough to go around. (We can randomly get them.)
With one new technology - QMD - that really speeded up the process, they had to make a decision. Because this new technology needed to use some licensed libraries they had to decide which compiler to use, for AMD or Intel processors. They looked at which processor type was the largest percent of all folding processors - Intel P4/Xeon. They also looked at which complier's libraries ran the WU the fastest - the Intel libraries.
Stanford recommends that these WUs only be run on dedicated machines. There are not many people that choose to run these WUs because they use so much memory bandwidth and ram (300MB for a short while at the beginning and then 200MB the rest of the time). In fact they are less than 1% of all WUs.
They say they benchmark them like all other bonus WUs, but they get more points per day. This has led to some hard feelings from Mac and AMD owners (AMDs do best on all other WUs).
Stanford has not been able to solve this problem yet - it is really an Intel/AMD not sharing their technology with each other problem.
The scientists desire to find cures takes precedent over hard feelings by some participants and so the testing of this new technology continues.
Thanks for considering Folding@Home for your next project.
This TeAm really should be ranked higher than 25 in this great project 🙂
EDIT: spelling 😕
